Jesus Freak: Feeding Healing Raising the Dead

"I came late to Christianity," writes Sara Miles, "knocked upside
down by a mid-life conversion centered around eating a literal
chunk of bread. I hadn't decided to profess an article of doctrine,
but discovered a force blowing uncontrollably through the world."

In this new book, Sara Miles tells what happened when she
decided to follow the flesh and blood Jesus by doing something
real. For everyone afraid to feed hungry strangers, love the
unlovable, or go to dark places to bless and heal, she offers hope.
She holds out the promise of a God who gave a bunch of housewives
and fishermen authority to forgive sins and raise the dead, and who
continues to call us to action. And she tells, in vivid,
heartbreakingly honest stories, how the ordinary people around her
are transformed by taking up God's work in the world.

Sara Miles offers a fresh, fully embodied faith that sweeps away
the anxious formulas of religion to reveal the scandalous power of
eating with sinners, embracing the unclean, and loving the wrong
people. Jesus Freak: Feeding Healing Raising the Dead is her
inspiring book for undomesticated Christians who still believe, as
she writes, "that Jesus has given us the power to be Jesus."

Sara Miles is the founder and director of The Food Pantry, and serves as Director of Ministry at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco. Her other books include Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Salon, and on National Public Radio. www.saramiles.net

"It is a book that manages to be inspiring without sentimentality -
serious and funny, sacred and profane." (San Francisco
Chronicle, March 17, 2010)

Pretty platitudes and trite church signs are not going to work
for former atheist Miles (Take This Bread: A Radical
Conversion). A late convert to Christianity, Miles writes of
meeting a living Jesus who has torn apart her world. No longer will
she be just a journalist and author; she will be a vessel, a
breathing body of Christ, living out his teachings and doing
"greater deeds" than his. Miles directs the Food Pantry at the St.
Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, where she seeks
to die to herself and live unto others. This book is not another
formulaic book on Christianity; it is alive with ideals of radical
inclusion, and Miles's "come and see," "go and do" attitude reigns.
Jesus is real and resurrected here and needs followers to feed,
heal, forgive, love, and be raised from a living death.
VERDICT This book is a clarion call to readers to go and do
to all around them as Jesus did. Sympathetic readers will find it a
passionate, verb-filled spur to action that is both enjoyable to
read and inspiring.—Nancy Richey, Western Kentucky Univ. Lib., Bowling
Green (Library Journal, February 15, 2010)

In these moving, empowering reflections, which challenge
"ordinary people" to follow Christ's model and engage in
extraordinary ministry, Miles—writer, cook, and founder of
San Francisco's St. Gregory’s Food Pantry—explains not
only gospel texts but stories from her life and the lives of
neighbors touched by St. Gregory's mission. Miles's obvious
homiletic gifts infuse the narrative: startling metaphors (Jesus as
promiscuous Boyfriend "who'll go with anyone") combine with honest
self-reflection and a wry sense of humor, prodding the reader to
take ownership of Christ's commands to serve, feed, and heal. Miles
believes in Christian formation through experiential practice:
recounting her midlife conversion, she states, "I tasted Jesus
before I read about him." Poignant stories of individuals
experiencing healing through serving others abound; in one,
reluctant "juvenile delinquents" working at the food pantry become
transformed by the gratitude of those they’re helping.
Illuminating the challenges of diversity, Miles testifies as a gay
Christian claimed by Jesus "as an integral part of his body" and a
"Jesus freak" among secular friends. Compelling and provocative,
this work promises to engage Christians in thoughtful discernment
about ministry. (Feb.) (Publishers Weekly, December
14, 2009)

The hardest part in reviewing the book "Jesus Freak" by Sara
Miles-- a book that my inner cynic thought I would dislike before I
read it -- is that I want to reprint the whole thing here so you
can wash your soul in its heartbreaking and inspiring beauty with
me.

Sara Miles was raised by atheist parents. A war correspondent
and then journalist in San Francisco, Sara Miles converted to
Christianity at age 46. She is a lesbian, in a 14-year relationship
with her wife. She was a skeptical intellectual. And she now runs a
huge thefoodpantry.org in San Francisco that operates out of St
Gregory of Nyssa's. It is held -- not buried away in the basement,
not in the parish hall -- but in the sanctuary. They serve over
500-600 people a week.

She describes her conversion:

At a moment when right-wing American Christianity is
ascendant, when religion worldwide is rife with fundamentalism and
exclusionary ideological crusades, I stumbled into a radically
inclusive faith centered on sacraments and action. What I found
wasn't about angels, or going to church, or trying to be 'good' in
a pious, idealized way. It wasn't about arguing a doctrine —
the Virgin birth, predestination, the sinfulness of homosexuality
and divorce — or pledging blind allegiance to a denomination.
I was, as the prophet said, hungering and thirsting for
righteousness. I found it at the eternal and material core of
Christianity: body, blood, bread, wine poured out freely, shared by
all. I discovered a religion rooted in the most ordinary yet
subversive practice: a dinner table where everyone is welcome,
where the poor, the despised and the outcasts are honored.

And so I became a Christian, claiming a faith that many of my
fellow believers want to exclude me from; following a God my
unbelieving friends see as archaic superstition. At a time when
Christianity in America is popularly represented by ecstatic teen
crusaders in suburban megachurches, slick preachers proclaiming the
"gospel" of prosperity, and shrewd political organizers who rail
against evolution, gay marriage and stem-cell research, it's
crucial to understand what faith actually means in the lives of
people very different from one another.

But the real story of her book, Jesus Freak, is the story
of the food pantry -- a place where the volunteers are not just
church members, they are members of the community being served --
they are the same people who fill their weekly bags with food.
Every week, about 50 volunteers sit down for a meal together, and
then they open the doors and pack up food for whoever comes through
them. There are no "qualifications" to get free food. No one has to
fill out forms.

Her book is full of stories of the Food Pantry, and her search
for meaning in her faith. Miles says, "Sharing food in this way was
about making whole new lives possible. At the food pantry we drank
out of the same cups, and put our sick, scarred hands on each
other. And sometimes, when we thought we were just going to have
lunch, we tasted heaven."(p. xvi)

There are stories of unlikely volunteers becoming stalwarts of
the team, stories of comforting the dying, and stories of finding
God in the faces of everyone she meets. She and her team, her
community, live out the radical Gospel, the love that includes all
and is not dependent on any one institution. "Culture," she says,
that great human yeast, continued to rise and swell and sour the
flesh-and-blood experience of God in every time and place...Yet all
religions...even the most liberal, were tempted by the reactionary
impulse to freeze faith in place. Because, as Jesus teaches, it is
easy to be threatened by the reality of the complicated, messy,
syncretic, God-bearing truth that becomes incarnate among us and
makes all things new. We'd rather have a dead religion than a
living God."(p. 137)

Sara is unabashedly in love with God. She takes delight in
walking the path of Christ -- for her it is more a dance. Yet there
is no Easter-bunny sentimentality in her. She lives in the gritty
reality of death and resurrection every day. She is there with the
sick, the infirm. In addition to the working poor, she feeds
mentally ill people, marginalized people, dirty people, street
people that are used to being rejected, cast away.

And sometimes it is hard. She formed a group for exhausted
care-givers at one point.

She wrestles with forgiveness in her life -- and learns about it
from surprising sources. She opens her heart every moment of every
day. The characters of the Pantry will be memorable to all who read
this inspiring and uplifting book. You'll want to know them, know
what happens to them. You'll want to help them.

In a 2006 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, she
was asked the following question:

Q: People often talk about a divide in this country between
the secular left and the religious right. Where do you fall in that
scheme?

A: I know that there are a lot of Christians who don't think
I ought to be allowed in the club. Luckily, Christianity is not a
club. It is, as my favorite patriarchal, misogynist, homophobic
apostle -- St. Paul -- said, a body. "There is no Jew or Greek,
slave or free, male or female anymore. For you are all one in Jesus
Christ." What counts is not who you are. Your human status is not
the point.

When I started this book, I thought I would find a preachy, airy
book about conversion and doctrine. Instead I found a gift of
meaning, a shared struggle, a beacon of hope -- a true
communion.

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